AC/DC Singer Brian Johnson - "The Easiest Riffs In The World Are The Hardest Ones To Write, Because They Are Very Few"
May 14, 2009, 15 years ago
AC/DC singer Brian Johnson spoke with New Zealand's Nzherald.co.nz following the news that the band's Black Ice Tour will be heading to New Zealand and Australia in early 2010.
AC/DC's glory years were in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Young brothers Angus and Malcolm's pioneering, gritty guitar riffs helped forge a new era in rock, and their outrageous antics (Angus still dances on stage in a schoolboy suit, though his mooning days may be over) helped propel the band to stardom.
For all their success, they've never received much critical acclaim; in fact, the band was more likely to be derided and ignored than celebrated.
If Johnson has any complaints about AC/DC's career, that may be the main one.
"The critics have always been a little flippant with AC/DC about Angus and the school suit, and it's always easy to have a quick little joke or a dig at the expense of it, the easy riffs, and such and such, and they're all dead wrong," he says. "The easiest riffs in the world are the hardest ones to write, because they are very few.""Highway to Hell is easy, but you ask a guitarist, it's not that easy," he adds. "Nobody can write them because easy things are very difficult to write ... and to put them together in different computations and to come up with something fresh and different. It's genius, but the critics never figure that out."
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